The walk-around world was room temperature
at 6 a.m. I saw Walt Whitman
leaning against the wall of The Piggly Wiggly,
a bottle of cheap hooch stuck in
his whiskery maw. A pitiful figure of a man, shirts
begrimed like his sarcous hide, no longer
human skin, but something other.

Poor old soak, I thought, after all the
years of abuse, the vile,
woebegone hammering of America.
I took a step or two toward him. He eyed me
with understandable suspicion.
“Sorry,” I said, backing
away. “I thought you were someone
else.” “Ok, sport,” he shouted after me.
“Publish my name and hang up my picture
as that of the tenderest lover.”
On the way home a song was born in me,
a new song.